The Ogg codec pack is being installed by default in the new Windows Insider
build, with an eye towards turning it on by default in the future. Awesome!
This includes Ogg and WebM container, Vorbis and Opus audio, and Theora and
VP8 video (and VP9 video if hardware-accelerated or manually enabled).
Appears to include both standard <video> and <audio> support and MSE
streaming. The main hurdle left to deal with for future streaming support
is VP9 being disabled when not hardware accelerated; that means we'll need
to keep shipping VP8 video alongside VP9 (or if we resolve the licensing
issues, H.264 alongside VP9). The VP8 (or H.264) would be less
bandwidth-efficient.
I'll see if I can wrangle a more direct contact to ask about the VP9
support and whether there's any way we can opt in to software VP9 decoding
(still more efficient than using the ogv.js shim).
To summarize, current state:
Edge without the codec pack:
* audio: plays MP3 natively if present, otherwise plays Ogg Vorbis through
ogv.js
* video: plays WebM VP8 through ogv.js
Edge with the codec pack:
* audio: plays Ogg Vorbis natively
* video: plays WebM VP8 natively
-- brion
On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 9:18 AM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Microsoft has introduced a codec pack which adds
support for Ogg Vorbis
and Theora media to the Edge browser, as well as enabling WebM VP8 and VP9,
in regular <video> elements.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/12/05/introducing-web-media-
extension-package-ogg-vorbis-theora-support/
They seem to have done it right -- if you install it, Commons will
automatically pick up the native WebM or ogg playback and use it in place
of the ogv.js JavaScript shim. Neat!
If we're lucky, this'll get rolled into a default option some day; if not,
we can still point to the download fairly easily as an "improve your
playback experience" warning. (Filed
https://phabricator.wikimedia.
org/T182129 to improve this.)
-- brion